The Collected Letters, Volume 32

I found your letter waiting here last night. Some three months ago, a similar application was made to me on the part of Messrs.
Appleton of New York;1 but the sum offered was too insignificant to be negociated upon; and I fear I forgot to answer at all. The “American Edition”
of Frederick is not bargained for anywhere as yet,—nor indeed is the English one: I wish it was all quite ready for that! But £20 a volume
will do nothing for us, now or henceforth. It seems rather likely a certain Boston house will undertake the affair, with whom
I am already in treaty about something else that you are concerned in.2

Mr. Forster's marriage cards have arrived here.3 We will heartily wish well to that business.— I expect to be home at Chelsea on Saturday night, after all these wanderings
Highland and Lowland; the word will then be, All hands to work,—for there is a huge mass of unsorted rubbish now close ahead!
Mr. Gilchrist professes himself ready to begin printing,4 so soon as he has had a brief conference with me, which we hope will be possible next week early. I hope that Mr. Chapman5 also is come home, or coming.

2. Phillips & Sampson; Emerson was helping TC to negotiate with them for an American edn. of Chapman & Hall's planned cheap edn.
of TC's Works, 16 vols. (1857–58); see TC to RWE, 20 July 1856, and TC to RWE, 16 Sept. 1856. The first U.S. edn. of the first two vols. of Frederick was by Harper & Bros. (New York, 1858).

3. Forster had m. Eliza Anne, b. Crosbie (1819?–94), widow of the publisher Henry Colburn d. (1855; ODNB), 24 Sept., to the surprise of his friends. Dickens said that when Forster told him he was getting married, “I lay down flat, as if
an Engine and Tender had fallen upon me” (Davies, John Forster 108). After the wedding the Forsters spent two months in the Lake District; he told a friend: “I have taken a house in Montague
Square (No. 46) … and (upon my return) poor old Lincoln's Inn Fields, where I have lived for three-and-twenty years, will
hereafter know me not!” (Davies 108–9).